Bedford Resident’s Virtual Classroom at Minuteman Community Education

December 3, 2013
Bedford's Stephan Hovnanian - Courtesy photo
Bedford’s Stephan Hovnanian – Courtesy photo

Special to The Bedford Citizen

Personal development has long been heralded as one of the tenets to success. For already over-stretched and over-stressed businesspeople,  a class on the latest trends in resume building or even a good book club is often shelved in deference to working later hours (or worse, Boston area traffic).

As a result, community education programs, especially for adults, have had to compete for attention. This fall, Bedford resident and web strategist, Stephan Hovnanian of Shovi Websites, learned how hard it is to compete with the precious time of area businesspeople, when he contracted with Minuteman Community Education to offer two seminars. One, aimed at helping businesses learn tips on how to make their email newsletters more effective, fell totally flat on enrollment.

The second, a workshop about the social network Google+, and what it can do for your business, was facing cancellation due to low enrollment when Hovnanian approached Jill Asser, Director of Community Education, with an idea.

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“When I promoted the event on my Google+ page, there was a ton of response from people around the globe. Obviously, none of them would be able to attend an event in Lexington, so I asked Ms. Asser if she would support converting this class to a webinar.”

According to Asser, previous adult continuing education classes about social media topics have had between five and seven registrants. At the time the decision was made to convert the class to a webinar, there were two.

However, when pitched as a webinar, Hovnanian was able to pull eight more attendees, one from as far away as Alaska, for a total of ten registrants.

“I have carved a niche for myself in the area of creative ways to use Google+ for your business and personal brand, so it was fantastic to see the response from the Google+ community. The fact that 10 people decided to invest in this workshop, when the culture of social media is that everything is offered for free, is a testament to their commitment to their business. I didn’t want to let anybody down. The fact that we saved this class from cancellation and boosted enrollment past the typical number also meant a great deal to me to support the school.”

The workshop was conducted using Google+ Hangouts On-Air, a Google+ product that records a live broadcast to the host’s YouTube channel. Hovnanian used an app called Business Hangouts to both protect the video (since it was a paid event), and add webinar-like functionality to the broadcast. The attendees were able to raise their hands and ask questions in a chat window, while Hovnanian went through his slides as well as spoke live through his webcam to the audience.

After the event, Hovnanian provided a link to watch the replay of the entire workshop, which also included the slides from his presentation and a writeup of key points with related links. “One of the best parts of a webinar is the replay,” Hovnanian said, “and I was happy I could provide a central place for the video, slides, and links to other articles I’ve written that support the topics we touched on that night.

“Another interesting effect of the webinar,” Hovnanian continued, “is that we aren’t bound by the physical restraints of the high school. For Minuteman, offering more webinars for business classes opens up time slots during the business day, which could boost enrollment even further.”

“Minuteman is thrilled to be working with Stephan and Shovi Websites to offer new classes and webinars to our students,” said Ms. Asser after the event. “We were excited to host our first webinar with Stephan’s Google+ class this fall. We know that many of our students value the interaction with each other and their instructors in the Community Education setting and also realize that some students will have an easier time making it to a class if they can log in from home or work. We look forward to many more classes and webinars with Stephan!”

Hovnanian will be offering this webinar through Minuteman Community Education in the Spring. Stephan is also available to speak about Google+ to your company or organization. You can reach him at https://stephanhov.com.

Editor’s Note: Stephan and his company host The Bedford Citizen and have provided invaluable support for our web marketing and social media efforts.

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December 3, 2013 1:23 pm

Thanks again for the writeup, and thank you to Minuteman for being a guinea pig for this new way to approach continuing ed!

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